Nowadays, various types of connected communication devices, including consumer electronics and M2M devices, are connected to, and are capable of accessing various services from their respective service providers, such as e.g. YouTube, Spotify, or a TV broadcasting services distributor, through one given communication channel that is also being used for proving all types of required feedback from the devices to the service provider. FIG. 1 is a simplified illustration of several communication devices 110a . . . 110n, which are, according to common practice, all connected to a service provided by an application server (AS) 120 via one or more communication channels that are being used for transferring content to and from the communication devices, by applying two-way connection for user data, and one-way connection for providing feedback data associated with the provided service from the communication devices to the AS.
For simplicity reasons, access network nodes as well as core nodes which are also normally applied for providing the described communications are not shown in FIG. 1.
Given that there is a number of different applications within a communication device that could use the same service, such as e.g. streaming of a video from YouTube, and a number of communication devices in the network that may run these services simultaneously, the problem of requesting for, and receiving, feedback can be seen on different levels. It is normally of great importance for a service provider to receive timely feedback reports whenever something goes wrong with the service, and also to be able to ask for feedback information, such that the AS e.g. can respond by sending some information, such as e.g. configuration updates of the service to ensure the best quality of service, e.g. how to configure a communication device to ensure the best possible quality at the device.
Therefore, if something goes wrong with the available channel, for example, as a result of lack of sufficient bandwidth, or if there is some kind of failure with the channel access then there will be limited or even no possibility at all for one, some or all of the communication devices to report to the AS that something is wrong with an ongoing service delivery. Typically a communication device may experience that performance is degraded, or that the ongoing service is not delivered at all. Such a scenario can become especially severe when subscribing for media services where large amounts of content, representing feedback data, are supposed to be transmitted from a communication device to the service providers AS through the applied communication channel.